Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

Hire lucky or hire smart?

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From everything I saw in 2002, looking for programming work was tough. The years before that, folks were handing out jobs to those with even a seedling of coding talent.

Then came the economic U-turn. A recurring joke amongst programmers looking for work during 2002-2003 was that a position description would ask for the world, including ten years of Java experience. Then we would all chuckle, because Java is a new language, invented in 1995 (the joke ends when Java turns ten this month).

While the most superstar programmers have jobs now, there are still companies looking to hire the best (via Jason Kottke). It was with this in mind that I sat down Sunday afternoon to finally read Lucky or Smart? by the co-founder of Tripod.

I found out about this book from Brad Feld, whose review mostly just listed the table of contents:

  1. Lucky or Smart?
  2. Entrepreneurs Are Born, Not Made
  3. Entrepreneurs are B-Students. Managers are A-Students.
  4. Great Is the Enemy of Good
  5. Start-Ups Attract Sociopaths
  6. Practice Blind Faith
  7. Learn to Love the Word “No”
  8. Prepare to Be Powerless
  9. The Best Defense Is a Gracious Offense
  10. Don’t Believe Your Own Press. In Fact, Don’t Read.
  11. Always Be Selling Your Stock
  12. Know What You Don’t Know

And there it is, the title of the third chapter, the reason I wanted to read the book: Entrepreneurs are B-Students. Managers are A-Students.. Never have I been prouder of my three-point-oh. Managers certainly have their spot in the workplace, but to have an innovative company, it probably is a good idea to hire some of us slackers.

My new office

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Blurry as the webcam photo might be, this is the view from my new office in downtown Portland. It’s been a crazy couple weeks moving out of the old space, into the new space, and working on top of it. I’m thinking I’ll be in this one for awhile.

When I had a couple moments free, I hooked up an old webcam and made a short thirty second tour of the place:

My new office.

43Things traffic

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In February, Salon caused a brouhaha over 43Things, which ended up in some “bad” publicity. I posted a graph of the 43Things spike in traffic. Naturally that died down, but a month later a nice chunk of it appears to have stuck around.

Day of Salon article

43Things saw its traffic spike with bad publicity

Today

43Things kept a healthy portion of their spike in traffic

Around the Bend

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We sprinted away to Bend this weekend for an impromptu overnight stay at Sunriver. It was my first time to central Oregon and waking up to snow-coated wilderness made me an instant fan.

Before heading back over the Cascade range, we visited some friends of friends at their machine shop. It is a candy machine shop, a place where they make/repair machines that make candy, specifically saltwater taffy and chocolate anything. I was especially taken by the many refurbished 1920s taffy wrapping machines. The design is so simple and it comes together to wrap taffy at 160 pieces per minute (and apparently that is slow).

For a real treat, check out the documentary-like video (20 MB) of their chocolate enrobers. It’s a little old school, but it oozes the passion of getting things just right.

Only good URLs

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There is a kind of beauty in a good URL (Uniform Resource Locator, or web address). The nameofsite.com part is important, but once you’ve decided on that, there’s more. Picking a good directory structure and naming convention makes a URL shareable and easy.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of examples of bad URLs. They are long and mean nothing to humans. For example, here is a very basic Amazon.com link (1):
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00023J4H0/duvinci-20/
As soon as you click on it, Amazon adds yet another bit of meaningless garbage–a session identifier, something like 103-4016647-1367485.

It’s very easy for we programmers to start slapping /info.php?name=adam&game=coding stuff onto our URLs. This is the way that our programs accept data, so it has become second nature and we are used to seeing it. Wouldn’t our users rather see info/adam/coding/ … ? (2)

I use URL rewriting to provide web addresses that are short, memorable, and easy to share. Apache’s mod_rewrite does the trick on Unix-like systems and ISAPI_Rewrite is your IIS variant.

A List Apart does a good job of walking the walk with their directory structure, as well as giving a great introduction to URL rewriting.

* A few notes: 1. Amazon is actually doing some rewriting to get the URL I mentioned, but my point is that shorter and less numeric would still be better. 2. I sometimes question whether your average surfer even knows how to find their current location.